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Friday, October 05, 2012

Educational Readings by Allan Alach: Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn

Educational Readings-

By Allan Alach

Last week I commented on the international connectiveness of our
educational network. This was proved in short order, when Diane Ravitch, in
USA, posted a blog referencing the article about Mike Feinberg and KIPP schools
that was in last week’s readings. Not long later, US academic Scott McLeod
tweeted the same link! Great!

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in New Zealand that gives
us hope that the GERMs may be meeting their doom.A number of things have happened - firstly
the Ministry of Education, following a dictate from the minister, published
each school’s national standards dataset on a website.This followed on from newspapers publishing
league tables based on this ‘ropey’ data (Prime Minister’s description). The
fact that the previous minister had promised that league tables would not
result from national standards was conveniently ignored, and shown for the
mistruth it was all along. The publication of the data immediately resulted in
a wide of range of articles debunking virtually every aspect of national
standards as applied in New Zealand.The
‘general public’ have not fallen for the league tables bait, as was hoped, nor
bought into the accompanying teacher and school bashing. Given New Zealand public’s
long history of supporting primary schools, this isn’t surprising, as previous
National Party Ministers of Education have discovered.

At the same time the Minister of Education, accompanied by the
Secretary of Education (CEO of the Ministry) held a meeting in the earthquake
damaged city of Christchurch to explain the ‘necessary reorganisation’ of
schooling in the area. There were so many errors and problems with this meeting
that it would take a long article to explain. The outcome has been nationwide
awareness of the whole process and its underlying agenda of school closures and
charter schools, acerbated by a farcical interview on a current events TV show
where the incompetence of the Secretary for Education was laid out for all to
see. We need to feel some sympathy for her, as her minister dropped her in the
hot seat by refusing to front up herself - not surprisingly given her inability
to answer questions.

Coincidentally, and very fortuitously, Finnish educator Pasi
Sahlberg has been here to speak to both primary and secondary teacher union
conferences, and this has really served to highlight the void between Finland’s
success and the GERM (Salhberg’s phrase) infected approach of the
government.Sahlberg described his
meeting with the minister as ‘interesting.’ The education spokespeople of the
opposition parties, on the other hand, attended both union meetings, heard
Pasi’s presentations, and engaged in panel discussions with him. These
politicians have clearly got the message about the way New Zealand needs to go
- returning to the model that attracted Finland in the first place!

Other events in New Zealand over recent weeks are making it
increasingly likely that the next election in 2014 (maybe earlier given how
fast the wheels are falling off this government) will see a change of
government. This would result in a rapid disinfection of education to make it
GERM free. This will then provide hope to other countries that the GERMs can be
eliminated.

“I
believe fervently that Michelle Rhee and an army of like-minded bad-schools
philosophizers will one day look around and see piles where their
painstakingly-built sandcastles of reform once stood, and they will know the
tragic fame of Ozymandias. Billion-dollar data-sorting systems will be
mothballed. Value-added algorithms will be tossed in a bin marked History’s Big
Dumb Ideas.”

“The
current structure of the school day is obsolete, most would agree. Created
during the Industrial Age, the assembly line system we have in place now has
little relevance to what we know kids actually need to thrive.”

Sorry, kids, GERM minded deformers have
decreed that the 19th century had the ideal education system. Tough.